Picture Frederick Augustus Olds gathering stories from every county. The museum is temporarily closed right now, but its story is very much alive here in downtown Raleigh. Begin with Frederick Augustus Olds, known as the “father” of the museum, who began collecting in the late 19th century and eventually traversed all 100 counties at least once.
He gathered not only objects but the stories that go with them, a philosophy that still shapes the museum today. On December 5, 1902, Olds merged his large private collection with the material on display in a room of the State Museum and the assortment became known as the Hall of History, opened to the public. That original hall contained 37 cases filled with items as various as a studded shoe buckle owned by James Iredell and other artifacts that told North Carolina’s past.
The institution you see is also an affiliate through the Smithsonian Affiliations program and is part of the Division of State History Museums, Office of Archives and History, an agency of the North Carolina Department of Cultural Resources. Even closed, this building still anchors a deliberate effort to use objects and stories to connect you to the state's past, right here among the downtown Raleigh blocks.